Zenith G730, Philco PT-41

[Adam]

I'm beginning my break by fixing a couple of radios before I move on to working on my Lincoln.

I got the Zenith going already, I'm listening to it now. I picked it up at the WARCI swap meet about 3 years ago, just finally got to working on it last night. It's one of those hi-fi models with the electrostatic tweeter. I've had several of the larger models with the electrostatic tweeter and bigger main speaker from this era, but I think this one sounds better. Maybe something about the acoustics of the smaller cabinet?

The Philco will probably take me all day, this is one of those radios where I'm going to have to replace all the wire...

I should probably put this in the solid state section, but after the Philco I have this interesting RCA 8-track player lined up (It goes in a wood cabinet with built in speakers). One of the channels is dead - I can hear static when I mess with the controls but no sound, I'm hoping it's just a bad coupling capacitor and not a hard to find transistor or nearly impossible to find head.

[Adam]

The philco is phixed

It was a mess in there - I wish I had taken a before pic. Not only had the insulation crumbled on most of the wire, some of it had melted, and someone had tried to change some of the capacitors (a long time ago - the 'new' caps were nearly as old as the originals) and had attached them by splicing wires and using tape. I just took all the old wire and caps out and put it back together nearly from scratch following the schematic in the 1940 Beitman's, so it took me longer than expected. And the 35A5 (output tube) had been swapped for for a 50A5, surprisingly it didn't make much difference, but I dug up a 35A5 out of a box of used tubes and swapped it in anyway.

Over the past few years I've been trying to make the table radio collection I have on this shelf look more and more symmetrical (you'll see what I mean when you look at the pic). This second 1940 model, loctal tube era, Philco was sort of the last piece of the puzzle. I think this is as symmetrical as I'm going to get.

[Kevin Kuehn]

That's a very nice looking collection, and and classy shelf too.